(Photos: courtesy of Welty Environmental Center)

Welty Environmental Center Celebrates 22 Years of Connecting People with Nature this year

Welty Environmental Center (1201 Big Hill Court Beloit, WI 53511) has been in operation for over 20 years in the Stateline area, bringing environmental education programs to over 7,000 people per year (70% of these visitors are school-aged). Its activities consist of a variety of learning experiences, including projects that meet state standards for school and home school groups, special workshops for teachers and adult leaders, festivals and programs for whole families, library outreach, summer day camps, and activities in collaboration with many not-for-profit groups in Beloit and the surrounding Stateline area.

Welty also trains volunteer Naturalists (high school, college-age, and adults) to present and lead environmental programs for their participants, especially the 100+ school groups that use Welty as an educational resource annually. Welty is housed in Big Hill Center, located in the prairie area of City of Beloit’s 190-acre Big Hill Park. At the Center, you can pick up a trail map that will lead you around the many maintained trails in the park, including a paved bike trail and roads that loop from the top of the hill to the river’s edge. Welty sponsors day camps and public programs for youth during the summer, as well as workshops for the family and even volunteer work days, for folks interested in helping with ongoing prairie restoration efforts.

On June 8, 2019 Welty unveiled a set of interpretive signs created to highlight the social and natural history of Big Hill Park, which was opened in 1926 as a memorial park for World War I veterans. Each sign includes information and photos of significant aspects of the Park’s history, including: the ski jump; woodland ecology; human use of the woodlands (including details of the 1930s WPA projects); geology; the founding of the park; prairie ecology and restoration; and pollinators. Replicas of  each sign and a large version of the trail map are hung in the Big Hill Center's lobby, so visitors can orient themselves before hiking the park to find the signs.

The plans for a nature center in Beloit, predate Welty by another 20 years. The Beloit Junior Women’s Club adopted Big Hill Park in the late 1970s, and began working with the City to develop an improvement plan for the grounds. These plans came to include the possibility of building a nature center at the entrance of the park (which, in 1991, was still just the wooded area of the grounds). In 1995, the City purchased the Kopplin Farm adjacent to the woodland, and let it revert back to prairie-like conditions; the Badger Council Girl Scouts arranged to build their service center in this space, and included an environmental education room in their plans. Concurrently, plans for a Welty Environmental Center were laid in the later 1990s with a generous gift from a former student of Beloit College biology professor J. Carl Welty.

Beloit College faculty members Richard Newsome and Fred Mathews were the founders of this effort and conveners of a Steering Committee in 1998, which ultimately led to the incorporation of Friends of Welty Environmental Center in 1999. In 2001, Welty took up residence in Beckman Mill Park, which would be its home for the next 14 years. In 2015, the City of Beloit invited Welty to be a full-time tenant in the Big Hill Center, which the Girl Scouts sold back to the City in 2014. Welty has been at Big Hill Park since September, 2015, runs all its programming from the Center, and helps manage various restoration efforts in the park.

IF YOU GO

Address: Welty Environmental Center is located in Big Hill Park 1201 Big Hill Center Beloit, WI 53511

Hours: M-F, 9am-3pm, most days.

For more information about the Welty Center and its programming, visit the website (www.weltycenter.org),

Email: info@weltycenter.org,

Phone: 608-362-6212.